MONMOUTH – For the Minkowskys, the iron curtain finally fell last week.

The Monmouth family hosted a cousin from Poland, Szymon Witkoloski. He and his wife, Mariola, tasted lobster, marveled at the green trees and slept comfortably in their relatives’ lakeside home.

And Szymon felt the affection of long-denied family.

“I want to take back their welcome,” he said, to return to Poland with it like a souvenir of his journey.

The family was split apart for so long.

“My father was going to bring my Szymon’s grandmother to the United States,” said Carroll Minkowsky Jr.

It never happened, though.

His dad, also named Carroll, left his home in Belarus around 1918 and came to America. He spent time in Detroit and Woburn, Mass., before settling in Lewiston in 1921.

Meanwhile, he’d stayed in contact with his brother, John.

The family had moved from Minsk in Belarus to a town outside the Polish city of Krakow.

As the elder Carroll became more settled here, eventually buying a house that still stands on Lewiston’s South Street, he tried to bring his niece Barbara to America.

“Everything was put in place,” said the younger Carroll Minkowsky, now a retired Maine legislator.

“They spent two years,” he said. “It was a very trying negotiation.” Lawyers were hired to navigate the bureaucracy. She spent months gathering the needed documents.

Then, in 1947, immigration was abruptly cut off.

“It was the Polish government that closed that door,” Minkowsky said.

Communication between the two sides of the family faded. Folks died.

“There was a large void of many years,” he said.

In the 1970s, a phone call from the family ended the black-out. A cousin, who was traveling with a ballet company, tracked down the younger Carroll Minkowsky.

And in 1995, he and his wife, Muriel, went to Poland. They met family they’d only heard of.

“I don’t think your father dreamed we would go to Poland and meet his family,” Muriel said.

And they even met Barbara.

“She still had all the original paperwork my father had sent to her,” Carroll said.

Today, at 96, she still carries a lingering hope of seeing America.

When Szymon, 32, told her he was visiting here, she asked to come along.

“She’ll never leave that,” Muriel said. “That is always going to be part of that thinking. Now, she’s too old.”

And for Poles, the trip remains difficult.

For Szymon, who holds a sociology degree but works in a ball-bearing plant, the trip for him and his wife took two years of saving,

And the visa was tough to get. Of 200 applications in his group, the visas for Szymon and Mariola were among only 20 awarded.

Poland still worries that too many people will leave and never return.

For Szymon and Mariola, there was no thought of staying. Yet, the five-day visit in Maine seemed far too short.

Through an interpreter, Szymon said he felt like the family ties are far stronger than his relationship to Carroll as a third cousin might suggest.

Each night of his stay, he went to bed reeling from the flood of experiences, he said.

Some are just the differences of being in a foreign country, he said. One curiosity is the trees – they seem to pop up almost anywhere – and the wooden homes.

For Szymon, who is accustomed to cement or brick homes, they seem too fragile.

And there are moments when he felt like a character in a TV show.

One day last week, he rode with his cousin, Lewiston Police Lt. James Minkowsky, in his cruiser.

Nothing much happened. It didn’t need to. He got to spend time with his cousin.

“I will come back,” he said. “I promise.”